


In the darkest time of year

by anamia



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: Afterlife, Hades is not great at interpersonal relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-08-04
Packaged: 2019-06-21 13:48:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15559077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamia/pseuds/anamia
Summary: Orpheus visits her, sneaks in through the back ways to Hadestown and steals minutes, even hours of her time whenever he can get there. He charms the foremen and the gatekeepers, whispers sweet sentences to the furies guarding the tracks to buy their silence, sings of sunshine to ease his passage through the desperate, aching workers on the wall. In winter, Persephone lets him in, slips him through the back passageways of Hades’ palace and presses his hand into his lady’s herself. In summer, he manages it on his own.





	In the darkest time of year

Hades is waiting at the station when Orpheus dies.

He’s an old man, bent and browned from a lifetime in the sun, his fingers calloused and curled, as though they still held the lyre that was his constant companion in life. Hades takes him in with a glance, unable to see anything but the youth with earnest eyes from so long ago, and rumbles, _I’ve come to lead you to the underworld. I couldn’t have you sneaking into my factory again_.

He expects something from Orpheus, a plea or a denial, a song, even. Instead, he receives silence. Hades tries to pretend it doesn’t bother him. He takes Orpheus by the hand, leads him through the waiting room and into the train, the other train, the train that goes straight through Hadestown without stopping and terminates in the underworld that bears Hades’ name. The conductor comes by, ready to ask for a fare, to extract the gold coin Hades already knows Orpheus doesn’t have. He waves the conductor on.

They pass the ride in silence, the God of Death and the mortal poet. Orpheus looks out the window, his hands sometimes idly moving through the air, plucking strings of an instrument already smashed to pieces. Hades wonders what melodies the desolate landscape evokes, with its barren hills and smoke-charred huts. The razor wire fences are smeared with the blood of those who’ve tried to trespass and failed, the dry rust of it standing out amidst the grey-black of the coal dust.

Hadestown rushes closer, the electric blaze of its lights not quite blocked out by the eternally growing wall. If he wanted to, Hades could squint his eyes and make out individual figures hammering away, could pick out the doomed souls who signed their lives away for the promise of riches. Instead he watches Orpheus, watches how he tries and fails to hide how he’s straining to see through the glass, to pick out with mortal eyes what even Hades would have to work to spot.

 _Where is she?_ the poet asks, face pressed to the window. In his voice, hope wars with caution and wins.

 _Who knows?_ Hades says, the lie dropping smoothly from his lips. _The foreman assigns them their jobs, not me._

_Can I see her?_

_Of course_ , and Hades relishes the way Orpheus jerks his head around, eyes wide with disbelieving hope. _If you sign a contract, that is_.

The hope bleeds away. _No_ , he says, and turns his face back to the window. He keeps it pressed against the glass long after Hadestown’s lights have faded from even Hades’ view. He only moves when the train grinds to a halt at the end of the line. The station at the end of the tracks is small, with none of the Hadestown terminal’s cold opulence, just a pre-fabricated building with not even a false front to give it presence. No one waits for the incoming dead -- the afterlife teaches many things, but the main thing every soul learns there is patience. In the end, everybody dies. Even the Gods will end up here, in time. There is no need to wait at the gate.

 _Hey poet,_ Hades says, as Orpheus steps out of the train, ready to claim his reward for a life well lived. _For old time’s sake. Sing me a song._

 _No,_ Orpheus says again, and walks away, through the station and into the underworld. He doesn’t look back.

* * *

 

Hades checks in, occasionally. Says he’s doing his administrative duties and books a ticket to the underworld. Orpheus was given an afterlife full of grass and soft sunlight -- Hades is above all a master of justice, and Orpheus’ youthful crimes have already been judged and sentenced. The sun is only an illusion, but a clever one, woven from starlight and amplified with electric current. It’s the best Hades can do, this far underground, with material so out of his own domain. Even his wife smiled when he showed it to her, a true smile, one he hasn’t seen since the early days in her mother’s garden.

Orpheus is rarely alone, when Hades visits. There are plenty who remember him from when they still lived, and plenty more who’ve heard stories of the man and his golden tongue. He sings them songs of summer and of moonlight, of the crashing of waves and the humming of bees in the wind. He weaves tapestries of golden fields and trees weighed down with fruit until his audience weeps in ecstasy for tastes they can only barely recall. Each time, when Hades appears, he cuts himself short.

 _Sing me a song, poet_ , Hades says, after his audience has scattered and left Orpheus alone.

 _No_ , Orpheus says. The tone of it varies, some days spat with a venom Hades didn’t think him capable of producing, some days laden with nearly unbearable sadness, some days almost distracted, thrown out almost by habit. Those days anger Hades the most, send him back to Hadestown in a black cloud of fury that makes his workers, even his wife quail before him. Persephone watches him with barely disguised hatred as he storms into his workshop and slams the door behind him, throwing himself into his work with a vehemence that leaves as quickly as it arrived, leaving him drained and too exhausted to even be irritable when she at last comes looking for him and leads him to their bed.

* * *

Orpheus visits her, sneaks in through the back ways to Hadestown and steals minutes, even hours of her time whenever he can get there. He charms the foremen and the gatekeepers, whispers sweet sentences to the furies guarding the tracks to buy their silence, sings of sunshine to ease his passage through the desperate, aching workers on the wall. In winter, Persephone lets him in, slips him through the back passageways of Hades’ palace and presses his hand into his lady’s herself. In summer, he manages it on his own.

Hades throws him out, when he catches him, drags him back to the underworld and dims the sunlight in his glade a little more each time. _You could still sign on_ , he says to the back of Orpheus’ head. _Then you’d see her every day._

 _And slave my death away?_ Orpheus returns. _I’d rather take my chances this way._

When the sunlight in Orpheus’ glade is almost gone, barely brighter than the faintest stars, Hades brings him a lyre. It’s crafted of gold, strings made of hair-thin wire that ring with the sounds of the earth when plucked. It’s molded to measure, made to fit those gnarled hands exactly, to slide perfectly into the empty space under Orpheus’ fingers.

Orpheus doesn’t touch it.

 _It’s dead_ , he says, when Hades confronts him. _I can’t make music from something dead._

 _Are you not the poet they proclaim you to be?_ Hades wants to know, hands curling protectively around the instrument that took him weeks to forge. _Its strings play truer than any wooden instrument you could possibly find. How can you resist the chance to play with perfection?_

 _It’s dead,_ Orpheus repeats, but he’s not looking at the lyre anymore, he’s looking at Hades, looking the God so many fear directly in the eye without a trace of wariness. _Only dead things are perfect._

 _Everything around you is dead,_ Hades snaps. _The light you see is from stars that died a thousand years ago. The grass you sit on died last autumn, when the first frost hit. Those shades you play so willingly to died years ago, every one of them. And so did you. Or had you forgotten where you were, trapped in your fantasies of summertime?_

 _I didn’t forget_. Orpheus’ voice is quiet, earnest, so like the boy he once was that Hades has to remind himself that they stand in the underworld rather than on the cusp of Hadestown itself. He thrusts the lyre at Orpheus.

 _Take it,_ he says. _For when you change your mind_.

When Orpheus doesn’t move to take it, Hades sets it on the ground before him and turns away. He boards the train to Hadestown in silence, watching as the lights of his city grow closer and closer, lights brighter than the brightest summer’s day, brighter than nature could ever produce, lights made by his own sweat and hard work. He lets their glow bathe his face and envelop his heart. The Devil take Orpheus, and his wide-eyed innocence. Let him worship the sun he would never see again. Hades has better ways to spend his time than listening to his love-soaked verses.

* * *

The seasons change. Hades stays in his workshop, invents new machines and feigns surprise when Persephone doesn’t like them. During the winters he roams the mortal plane, drops whispers into willing ears and recruits more souls to work his factories. The wall is ever growing, and he needs more workers to build it. They trickle in, by ones and by twos, gaunt faces slowly turning to stone when they realize they’ve been sold half truths. Hades is a just God, a fair God, but not a kind one. He writes his contracts in small print and does not force anyone to read them closely.

Word trickles in that Orpheus has a lyre, an instrument made of living wood and sinew, still warm from sunlight and humming with the sound of the wind. He drags Persephone down into his dungeons, roars at her with all his fury, and she laughs in his face. _What do you care?_ she asks, drink in her hand and anger in the curl of her lips. _He’s just a dead man, just like all the rest._

 _He’s mine_ , Hades growls. _Not yours to play with._

 _He’s no one’s but his own_ , she returns. _You gave him that choice yourself, long ago. Or had you forgotten?_

Hades has not forgotten. He sends Persephone away with a snarl that she laughs off and paces the floor of his dungeons. His footsteps reverberate against the cold stone of the hall, loud and harsh, too erratic to even be a drumbeat. When he emerges, he doesn’t speak to Persephone for days.

He watches Eurydice, studies her body and her eyes, tries to discern for himself what this girl has that would make a man risk his afterlife just for a moment of her time. He finds nothing, just gaunt cheeks pale from lack of light and a back stooped from years of shoveling coal. The light in her eyes has all but gone out. If ever something was dead, it was her, her life signed away years ago to this very workshop, her soul Hades’ to do with as he wishes.

Orpheus comes back, wooden lyre in hand, and Hades sniffs him out before he can even get to Eurydice. He throws him back down into the underworld and snuffs out the last of the stars, refuses to look at him and doesn’t say a word. When he gets back to Hadestown he drags Eurydice away from the smelter and sends her to the mines instead, hands her a pickaxe and a headlamp and tells her to get digging. Soon, her face is stained black with coal dust that she coughs out at the end of each shift. When she catches him looking in her direction she stiffens and turns away, her body rigid with a hatred she can’t let out, not here. It should satisfy him, to see her broken like that, but it just leaves him feeling empty.

Within the year, Orpheus is back.

Hades throws him out again, tosses him into his pitch-black glade where the golden lyre still sits where he left it, all that time ago. Orpheus accepts this in silence, and turns up again a few months later. He’s learned the way by now, knows the best path to take through the wastelands, knows which houses to knock at for directions, which hearts can be touched through verse and which prefer his instrument alone, knows how to scale the wall and how to hide in its shadows. Hades catches him halfway to the mines and drags him away, confiscates the wooden lyre and sets a guard at the station at the end of the tracks. When Eurydice catches him watching now she looks at him with open loathing, and Persephone is colder than before, stiff and unwilling to share his bed even in anger. The wooden lyre vanishes from his workshop a few months into that winter, and Hades is too tired to even rage at her for it. He wants to yell at them both, to demand to know what else they expect of him, him who already bent the rules once for this boy. Why should Orpheus get special treatment, he wants to demand, when all he ever did was fail? He failed to keep Eurydice and then failed to win her back, and now he dares to ask for the chance to fail again? Hades would admire his boldness, if he was not so exhausted by it.

Orpheus shows up every few months, like clockwork, evades all the roadblocks Hades sets in his way and creeps into Hadestown to see his lover. Sometimes Hades catches him outside the wall, sometimes within it, sometimes not until he’s caught a glimpse of her, her hair stained grey with the dirt of the mine. Each time, when Hades throws him back to his glade, he searches Orpheus’ face for some sign of frustration, of anger or even of regret, but he finds nothing. Orpheus fails and fails and fails again, and each time he gets back up and tries again.

It causes rumors, Hades knows. The poet who keeps outsmarting the king, the mortal who keeps tricking the God. He’s losing face in front of his workers, who see how this one man finds his way to them again and again. Soon tongues will do more than whisper admiring words about his boldness. Soon, his methods will give them ideas. What can be done one way can be done the other, and Hades can see his workers already eyeing the wall with badly hidden speculation. He drives them harder, pushing them until they are too exhausted to plot, but it’s a temporary measure at best.

 _What harm is he doing?_ Persephone asks him, a challenge as much as it is a question. _All he wants is to see his lover. Don’t you remember what that was like?_

He does. He doesn’t tell her as much, but he does. He was a young man once, a young man who loved a woman so much he ached with it, so much he too snuck into forbidden territory just to catch a glimpse of her. But he is older now, older and wiser and he knows better than to believe that love can last.

 _And what will you do if this one does?_ the Fates want to know, thread passing through their hands and out into the mortal realm.

 _It won’t,_ he says.

_It might._

_Wouldn’t you know for sure?_

They don’t answer him, just go back to their spinning. He stalks away.

* * *

Orpheus looks up when Hades steps into his glade. His skin has lost all its golden hues, turned an ashy tan from the lack of light, but his eyes shine as bright as ever. Hades flicks on the switch and suddenly the glade erupts with light, the starlight tapestry aglow once more. Orpheus’ eyes close of their own volition, too adjusted to the darkness to take the sudden influx of light, but he tilts his head up to the artificial sun and lets it bathe his face.

Hades lets him adjust, stands in front of him and tries not to look too hard at where the golden lyre is slowly being devoured by the earth. At last, Orpheus opens his eyes again and looks across the distance between them.

 _Here_ , Hades says, thrusting a piece of paper at Orpheus. _So you stop giving my workers ideas._

Orpheus hesitates, but reaches out and takes the ticket from Hades. A railway pass, from the underworld to Hadestown, valid for eternity.

 _It’s a one way ticket,_ Hades says. _You’ll have to learn the way back yourself._

 _Is this a trick?_ Orpheus asks. Hades can see how he wants to let the sunlight into his face, wants so badly to believe in this gift he has been offered, but does not quite dare. Even after all this time, Orpheus has not learned to mask his feelings.

_No. Don’t distract her too often -- she has work to do._

Hades turns to leave, already half regretting having given in, but Orpheus bursts out, _Wait!_ When Hades pauses, turns back, the ticket has vanished and Orpheus has the wooden lyre, its wood now heavily burnished by years of playing, its strings worn but still tight and true. _For old time’s sake. Let me sing you a song._


End file.
